Category Archives: Life

“You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways.” – Chuck Palahniuk

My father was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes when he was six-years-old. At that time, he was told that he wouldn’t live to be twenty-five, and he lived a hard, fast life. If that prediction had been accurate, I wouldn’t be alive. However, at twenty-six, he was told that he was going to die before his thirty-fifth birthday. He survived, living even harder. Within his thirty-sixth year, my father took deathly ill, and it seemed like the early predictions of an early death would come true, but he pulled through. However, he was told by his physician that he would never work again. Oh, and, also, that he wouldn’t survive to be forty, and so on and so forth.

I’m a fat girl, and I don’t deny it. The thinnest I have been as an adult has been 135lbs. This was not a healthy thing for me. I had lost 30lbs in as many days thanks to the crash “Your gall bladder WILL try to gnaw its way out of your body through your liver if you eat anything with a .1 gram of fat…and that’s anything at all” diet.

This? This was not something I wanted. I had to exist, painfully, on mostly veggies, because anything else caused excruciating pain. See, what was not known by my doctors was that my “gallstones” were obstructing my liver, and by the time they figured that out, my liver was starting to fail. Funny thing about a gal that doesn’t fever; there was no way to tell until they actually tried to look for something causing pain so bad I couldn’t walk and could barely remain conscious. By that time, I had lost a dangerous amount of weight in a very short period of time.

What was my mother’s reaction? As I was recovering, she told me how good I looked for how thin I was. I felt horrible. Read More »

Suffice it to say, this post may be triggering. You have no idea how hard it is for me to start this post. I’ve tried about five different times. The problem is that it is so hard to approach something that is so close to my own personal history. I also have male friends, and I don’t want to alienate them. It’s hard to write something that may make someone think of themselves poorly. If that’s the case, I can’t say I’m sorry. This is one of those times, one of those issues, where it isn’t about the guilt it may make someone feel to confront their own internal biases. This is for me. This is for every woman that has ever gone through this. This is for any woman who has ever been told “you didn’t say yes, but you didn’t say no”. This is necessary to say, even if it hurts feelings, or I lose my treasured male friends because of saying it. I’m not one of those feminists that believes all men are inherently evil, but no one, male or female, wants to believe they’re capable of something they despise in others.

Yet more silence, until I push through the layers towards the sun. It’s once again spring. It’s hard to believe how fast this winter has gone given how long it seemed to take. If that makes any sense to you, please tell me how. Time passes so slowly for me when I’m trapped inside my own mind, behind the body that I find betraying me more and more often.

I spend my life in constant physical pain. In 2007, while I had had back problems for many years, they had finally settled down along with my health concerns, so much so that I was accepted into the Canadian Forces late in the summer. Two weeks before I was to go to basic training, an over-sized Dodge Ram was hit from behind and launched into the back of my Pontiac Vibe. Read More »

I had a post for today, but a server upgrade seems to have eaten it. As I had a very busy day at my day job, I was far too tired to recreate what I had posted. Therefore, I shall post a picture of my cute kitten, Thorgal the Mighty Kitty, nicknamed “Thori”, as a distraction, and I shall return on Friday with actual content.

The frowning girl’s card reads: “Needs to learn to work cohesively in a group setting instead of always trying to take control.”

The grades on the card show that the frowning girl has better average grades than the smiling girl. They live in the same neighbourhood. They are the same race. Their families are in the same economic bracket. The only difference between the two girls is their social standing. The smiling girl is popular; the frowning girl is not. Read More »

As an artistic, intelligent child, far older than my years, I was never a popular girl. At my first school, waves of popularity came and went like the tide. Therein, old friendships existed based on time served more than mutual interest; mainly, we had all been together since we first entered school and thought we’d always grow up with one another. Then, I moved away.

Before I moved, I had the position I like to call “Story Teller”. Or, in geekier parlance, Game Master. I created the universe and basic plot that we’d play out in our recess breaks. My games were popular because they utilized the entire school grounds. I relished that role and enjoyed the company, but honestly, I didn’t care if I had anyone playing along. I’d play off on my own in my little world, writing out loud as I now write novels and short stories. Granted, I was “That Strange Little Girl”, however, I was, at least, their strange little girl.

When I moved away, I was still “That Strange Little Girl” but without the familiarity. Read More »

When I reached grade one, my parents started having me walk with another girl on my street, we’ll call her Brenda, to school. It was probably a kilometer walk. Brenda was physically bigger than me, although in the same grade. She was also a complete and utter bossy bully type. She resented that she had to walk me. On the back home from school (and sometimes on the way to), she’d stop in at her grandparents’ house. She told me to hide around the side of the house on the commemorative trail-way/park beside their house so that I was out of sight, I assume now because she didn’t want to have to share the treats they gave her with me.

About mid-first-term, it started to rain and I didn’t want to wait in the rain. I walked right up to their porch and sat down on their swing, where her grandmother saw me and asked who I was. Brenda tried to tell her that I wasn’t anyone she knew, and I told them that I was the girl that walked home with her every day, and I was not going to wait out in the park in the rain until she was done getting a snack. Brenda grabbed the sleeve of my jacket and pulled me by it all the way to my house, practically pushing me into the mud of my front yard, where I defiantly stuck my tongue out at her retreating back as she stomped off through the puddles to her house. Read More »

When I tell people my youngest child, Aj, is Autistic, I’m always angry when I receive pity. I know that he gets confused when someone says hello to him and he very carefully makes eye contact back to them. When they repeat themselves, or when they don’t acknowledge his eye contact, he gives me a confused look and repeats his actions. Then I explain to the person that Aj isn’t verbal, but he is saying hello in his own way. Then the looks of pity, the condolences. I smile and I nod, and I remind myself that these people only know what they see on TV. They only hear whats on the news. They see the stigma of popular culture, and not reality.

Aj doesn’t have a disease. Aj is not going to die from being different. He is no more in need of a “cure” as, let us say, a person that only speaks French needs to be cured of it when they move to an English area. Read More »